YALE BY THE BOOK a trivial matter. I went to my fa- ther-he was reading the news- paper in the living room-and told hIm that 1'd be happy to go to the University of Missouri. That was true. He didn't say a word. He just waved me out of the room. The Yale representative at the college-night booth was not long out of Yale himself; he was from an established Kansas City family, and he'd been to boarding school in the East. At our final college night at Southwest High School, my father asked him two questions that astonished me. One was whether Yale had any sort of business training, since he said that he wouldn't want me to come out of college not even knowing rudimentary book- keeping. I wasn't astonished at the juxtaposition of accounting and Yale; for all I knew, ac- counting could have been a popular ma- jor there. I was astonIshed because one of the messages I had taken from my up- bringing was that I wasn't going to have to be involved with business. Actually, I had got the impression that I was ex- pected to be above such matters as perus- ing the business pages and discussing in- vestments-an impression that I have never exactly abandoned, much to the detriment of my finances. The other questIon was even more surprising to me. My father asked if Yale had any sort of Jewish quota that could keep me out even if I qualified in every other way. Al- though I had heard of quotas, which I as- sociated with medical schools, I had never heard my father bring up the sub- ject; I had never heard him acknowledge any limitations on what was available to me. Loolang back, I think that with the first step of the grand plan-my applica- tion to Yale-close at hand, he may have had just a moment of doubt. Was this re- ally going to happen? If it did, was it re- ally the right thing for me? The next mo- ment, the doubt was gone. I don't think it was any surprise to my father that Yale seemed to work out for me pretty much the way he had expected it to. Still weak from the heart attack, he came to New Haven for the commence- ment ceremonies and watched me deliver one of the speeches given by graduating 73 .--:::. -....:-...-1 ?d-.;z- r- ---- -- - ,- c-'{ 1::';r-,,' .o:;:- \ / -i 2 o/ :_ 0 % ''Do you ever miss New York?" . seniors at a Yale event called Class Day. My speech, the Class History, was meant to be funny. It used what passed for cyni- cism in my circle to talk about how Yale had prepared us for the world. After it was over, my father turned to Denny Hansen, who was sitting next to him, and said cheerfully, "If I thought he be- lieved any of that, 1'd have him shot." I don't know if I believed any of it, but by then I knew that my father's view of Yale as a place whose main purpose was to provide a reservation on the magic esca- lator-what I described in "Remember- Ing Denny" as a place that would "turn the likes of us into the likes of them"- was not my view. A year before, an op- portunity to explain that to him had come up with the approach of Tap Day-the event that in those quaint times decided whether a junior would be admitted beyond the Yale College equivalent of the pearly gates. Because I was the editor of the newspaper, I was likely to be tapped by one or another of the senior societies, and if that happened I wasn't certain whether or not I would accept. Not accepting a tap was a notion so contrary to my father's Stoveresque VIew of Yale that I thought it required ex- planation. Sitting in my office at the Yale Daily News very late one night, I started a letter to him. I was on the third page when I gave it up. I had decided that it . was too late to begin explaining that my view of what I was doing there was not precisely the same as his. Or maybe I was having trouble trying to explain precisely what my view was. Or maybe even I re- alized that discussing my reservations about the extracurricular Yale so impor- tant to Dink Stover might sound hypo- critical in a letter written from an office where I spent a lot more time every day than I spent at the library. Or maybe I decided that it was too late at night to write such a letter. I still think of it as the moment I might have broken the silence that I remember from those long drives to the city market. As it turned out, I decided to join a society anyway, and called my father after Tap Day to tell him. "That's not the one Stover was in, is it?" he said. "N 0, it's the other one," I said, and wondered ifhe had been following along with the book the whole time. I graduated from Yale thinking that I was grateful for the aspirations of my fa- ther that sent me there, even if I consid- ered it obvious that the effect of the ex- perience on me had been more in the way I thought and what I thought about than In the sort of career opportunities 1'd been given. Fifteen years or so later, I hap- pened to attend a birthday dinner that was made up mostly of people in my line of